Word: troell
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...saga of the Neilson family and their encounter with America, but the emphasis has moved from affirmation to a tougher examination of how attainable the dreams that fueled the myth really were, a hard-nosed appraisal that remains sensitive and respectful to the people who dreamed those dreams. Troell presents a lavishly detailed social portrait of the immigrants at work and at rest, lingering over universal moments of human experience--the birth of a child, the marriage of a friend, the death of a neighbor...
...TROELL, WHO PRODUCED, directed and edited the film, creates a world that rings true both as history and as cinema. His soft colors and elegant camerawork belie a willingness to experiment for chilling or striking effects such as the visual echo of quick cuts which shatters the silence of the forest when Karl-Oscar's younger brother Robert shoots what he believes is an Indian warrior. In his control of natural images, his imagination and sense of the complex relations of individuals to social processes, Troell comes closer to Bergman than any other current director. He edges near the best...
...Troell falls short of the Faulknerian, it is in his failure to cast his characters into fuller form. With few exceptions the immigrants remain chiefly archetypes--the homesick mother, burdened with children and aging, the father struggling to fulfill his dream of betterment for his family. In Troell's hands the characters are molded to illustrate the point he is making about our history, about...
...immigrants are contrasted with the haunting wraiths in the background, the remnants of the once-proud owners of the land. Troell's flair for faces shows poignantly in the aged, starving Indian women begging a scrap of meat from a frightened, guilty white woman. A narrator describes the oppression of the local Sioux tribes by the U.S. government as desperate Indians take to the warpath seeking food and redress, sweeping the settlers up in yet another external force they cannot comprehend but only react to. Troell does not look for easy morals--his Indians are brutal, gaunt and dirty beside...
...TROELL DELINEATES the central, original crack in the innocence myth--the new land was stolen from Indians who were hanged or murdered for trying to retake it. Troell does not blame the immigrants for a situation they did not create ("I paid a fair price for the land," says Karl-Oscar). The Indian dilemma is a symptom of the wider problem that underlies the history of the immigrant experience. At the center of the quest for the immigrant dream is a hollow place, born of the loss of the old home and bred of the sacrifices that...